Case Study| Enabling Application Modernization Strategy to improve performance and reliability | Azure Migration Roadmap | App modernization strategy
Application Modernization Strategy to Support Innovation Initiatives
American Nurses Association accelerates speed, performance and
data reliability for their 70+ applications
Industry: Non-profit Organizations |
Emp Size: 1000- 1500 |
Headquarters: Silver Spring, Maryland |
Founded in 1896, The American Nurses Association (ANA) is the main organization that represents the interests of the nation’s four million registered nurses.
Advancing and improving nursing practice is a critical way how it supports nurses in meeting the needs of patients across all healthcare settings and communities. It was planning to improve the use of modern apps, and data analytics to drive more value for its members and customers.
“This migration is more than just a technology shift. It is a huge step in enabling the technology to support our modernization initiatives”


Jeffrey Adkins,
Manager of Application Enterprise Development
Eliminating scalability, performance and Azure Migration Challenges in this application modernization case study
For a company that needed to connect people and nurses, their hosting environment and current technology were hindering them from completing their mission as a company. Their existing application environment was supported by a legacy hosting. Also the managed services provider was limiting their growth due to performance and reliability issues. Therefore, ANA was considering moving its applications out of the current hosting provider to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
It was looking to leverage Azure to help them modernize their applications and implement a scalable architecture by using the best practices for security, scaling, monitoring, deployment, and management.
It’s business objectives included:
✓ Building its institutional knowledge to increase velocity, adoption, and success of
ANA’s approach to Azure via education on best practices
✓ Improve its ability to scale the environment
✓ Improve Agility and the quality of service of its Applications by leveraging PaaS
✓ Reduce the administrative costs and complexity of the current environment
✓ Eliminate the need for the NTTA environment (MSP)


Recognizing the need to modernize applications and
design a full-scale azure migration roadmap


ANA was looking to modernize their systems in order to stay relevant in the evolving industry. In order to help ANA achieve this, Motifworks initiated a cloud economics solution assessment to gain insight’s on the client’s current environment. After working closely with ANA, Motifworks was able to determine which workloads needed to be prioritized for migration planning, understand the application portfolio, and create an actionable roadmap for a seamless migration to azure cloud. Motifworks worked to move all the applications off the NTT hosting service to Azure.
By doing this, Motifworks enabled the technology needed to support the modernization initiatives such as the Association Management System refresh and OARS 2.0.
As a result, Azure allows ANA to comprehensively monitor the health of their applications, scale their resource performance, automate backup and restoration, and save over 70K annually in the licensing cost through the EPI DXC environment.
Feeling confident about the results, Jeffrey Adkins, Manager of Application Enterprise Development expressed:
Implementing Application Modernization Strategy equals scale, performance and cost savings
The advantages of modernizing the applications are endless; which is what ANA also realized quickly.
With this solution, ANA had a complete, actionable roadmap to cloud in the form of the business case, readiness analysis, azure migration strategy, and phased migration plan for all 70+ of their applications. It has also given them the ability to process data and innovate with speed, restore databases with accuracy and eliminating crashing incidences.
Here are some more promising results they found out:
85% increase in application reliability
61% cost savings by moving to Azure PaaS platform
25% increase in performance of web applications
Fully comprehensive monitoring of applications
Secured application firewall to help them protect against malicious attacks
Proactively prevent application health issues by deep diving through them before occurence.
Modernization is a continuous process and ANA has taken the most crucial step in achieving its technological goals. Reliable applications, powerfully integrated systems, automated processes has equipped them to manage its innovation journey efficiently; which will help them collaborate systematically with its members.
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